Month: September 2006

So much information. Over the past couple of weeks there’s been a lot going on in this brain. Mostly web stuff, applications.

Gliffy, as mentioned previously, for which the video review is forthcoming.

ThinkFree, an online Office Document Management system, from which I’m currently scribing this.

NOPE .. as you can see from the two posts below, it didn’t quite work the way I was imaging. Still, was fun trying. Bit disappointing, Writely will have to continue along for now.

DabbleDB, the online database system that wow’d everyone a few months back. If you haven’t heard, just watch a few of their demo movies. Very cool.

Posticky, an online note system. This one is great for myself, when I want to just jot down stuff about something I’m using. Today I was using DabbleDB quite heavily, and realised I needed to take down somewhere my thoughts of the system as I was using it. Posticky is just the thing. Fits very well into, well, created a new process for me. One that is of great benefit. When I come to review DabbleDB, or anything else, I can go back over the notes I wrote while using it. This also means I don’t have to review straight away, but can spend some time mulling over the product while still retaining that initial experience info.

Nice.

As well, I’ve come up with a creative writing blogging experiment. A story for us. Story-telling for the web2.0 world. Not sure if it will go anywhere, we’ll see.

I’m still putting little bits of time into updating DevDawn with the latest WordPress build and K2 theme. The problem is that I haven’t set my testbed apache/mysql/php server up on here (laptop). That might be a good thing, because I can put the all in one Xampp into play. Will have to do that soon.

Then there is my actual job, which is progessively taking more time. This is not a bad thing so much .. it’s more that I’m investing greater amounts of myself into it at the moment because the part of the project at the moment is so very cool.

I’m finding myself reassessing other aspects. My brain actually thinks on the spot when spending time with the fam that I need to squeeze everything I can out of these times. Not because there will be less, but because it’s too important not to. Work is not my ruler. Work is something I am passionate about, and give a great deal to (and I include all my extra-curricular work in here too, blogging, development, crazy ideas) .. because it’s not my chief end. That’s a bit of a weird statement I guess.

Anyway, it’s late, my brain is heavily mushed, and I still have to watch some taped tv before the amount of stuff to view becomes far greater than my time to view it in :).

Finally, my old-school game resurgence continues with Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s still awesome. I’m only putting a couple of hours every couple of days. And now have the added draw of seeing the hype for Neverwinter Nights 2, and having it get me excited about that particular gaming experience.

I even fired up the original with xp’s and took a look into the Toolset. Wish I’d spent a bit of time with it earlier in the piece. It really sparks my imagination .. all these ideas start firing up about story-telling. Seems like a very accessible means. This might be because the idea of scripting and such is no hairy-scary for me anymore.

Anyway, cheers for reading this overly-large piece of ill-formed prose (stupid brain, trying too hard to make up smart sentences).

Gliffy is an online drawing program. It’s kind of like SmartDraw, but it’s free. And awesome.

Above is a link generated by making the drawing viewable to the outside world.

A deeper review is coming soon, once my current work-load eases a little.

Edit (28-09-06) ::NOPE .. had nothing to do with this post. It had a lot to do with the way the sidebar logic gives you a snippet of the post and the way the tag is morphed with spaces. Nice.Edit (26-09-06) ::Unfortunately, it seems to play a little havoc with some of my css. If you’re a Firefox wielder (IE is clean from this, dagnabbit), you can see it in the sidebar .. all but the top post snippet have been bolded. This could be totally unrelated to anything Gliffy. Better do some tests.

A thought occured to me last night as I lay in bed, after a couple of hours of Baldur’s Gate 2 (oh baby, there’s a bundle of love I’d completely forgotten about since playing it a few years back).

Computer gaming has evolved backwards.

Allow me to paint a picture (I’m only good with finger-painting).

As you grow from a bub, you get to play. Playing makes up a big part of being a kid, especially before school. Seeing my kids these days, my oldest is a few months away from school. For them at least, that’s how it is. And it was that way for me and my siblings too.

Playing together is another fundamental skill that comes early, especially if you have more than one kid. The more the merrier. Regardless of that too, sending the kids away to some kind of schooling (or daycare) would definately kick this up a notch.

Playing.

Now I’m going to go back against my original statement.

I wanted to show how computer gaming started backwards, that we begin life playing together, playing tips and hide-e-go-seek and lego and ..

But that’s wrong. We don’t. Playing originates depending on a bunch of stuff, siblings, parents, family life in general.

Let me go back.

As previously mentioned, I’ve been spending a bit of time with BG2 (and the exp, but haven’t got into it’s content yet, still on the original, taking my time). It’s been an utterly enjoyable experience. I’m not rushing, I’m just having fun.

It was built primarily as a single-player game, unlike NWN, which I believe was built to properly allow for dungeon-mastering in the computer land.

Anyway. Single-Player.

These are the first games I played. Single-Player. They consumed much of my early adulthood (and maybe some later too :)). The Bard’s Tale games, Ultimas, countless shareware rpgs.

But then I thought, that’s different to how we grow up as kids and then adults. We play together mostly. How do you play brandings by yourself? Or Hide-e-go-seek? Sardines, Tips, Bullrush, Cops/Robbers, Releaso, Fresh .. all AWESOME games ..

.. all of them Multi-Player.

For me, my experience, it’s been most definately Single-Player until the last few years. Multi-Player really kicked it up a notch (for me) with World of Warcraft. Before then, I was kind of scared to go in against real people.

But Multi-Player is something more. Running around like a mad-man in the dark chasing people is just some of the best fun you’ll ever have. Punishing someone by pulling off the biggest tackle of your life in a rugby match, or outwitting the backline as a prop by stepping when you shouldn’t really be able to step .. computer games mimic these moments, or they try to.

Man alive, this post has gone nothing like I thought it would.

I’m straying deep into non-development territory, plus, most of this is just plain babble. So thanks if you’ve stayed the course thus far.

I guess my original thought has gone through the usual process of change once I put some actual brain-power into thinking it through.

I’m all out of creative-energy .. I’ll leave it here and see how it turns out.

For the first time in a while (yeah, it’s been a while between posts too, shame shame) I’m writing within the realms of the WordPress Admin. Feels kinda strange to not have the flexibility of a full-blown word processor that autosaves what I’m typing (Writely, see This Post), amongst other cool features.

But Writely jigged me. I received an email (as everyone who had a writely account would have) saying I had to migrate across to my google email address .. naturally I did nothing about it until yesterday when I could no longer log in with my old account. Logging into my new Google account (not new really) I realised that none of my documents had come across.

Now, because I only took a cursory glance at the email, I presumed a few things. Presuming is bound to get you into trouble.

I presumed that Google knew who I was.

I presumed they would know both my normal email and my google email were linked, somehow, somewhere in the infinite depths of the data they store.

And finally, I presumed that Google would be able to magically pull my current documents across to my gmail account in Writely.

Bummer. It didn’t work out that way. And now I have no way (haven’t actually searched for people having the same problem, and there probably is some solution) to get at those documents.

There weren’t a huge amount of documents, and nothing I really need .. but it was the start of building up a nice collection of writings.

Big shout out to Clarion X today. John is putting together a nice site, lots of cool stuff. A serious bank of knowledge sits between his ears, and he’s putting the best bits onto the pages of Clarion X, so go on over, if you haven’t already, and take a look.

Elsewhere in the news, we read that .. well .. I haven’t read much of the news this week, so I’m gonna get back to work.

just had such a blast for the last fifteen minutes. The wonders of WordPress’s cache folder.

I was getting a wierd error at the top and bottom of the site, something to do with the wp-cache plugin.

Unplugging the plugin didn’t seem to solve the problem.

So naturally, of course, I just ftp’d in a deleted (that’s right, deleted, what a wonderful piece of functionality that I never get tired of using without thought) a couple of folders that looked suspicious.

Namely, the cache folder.

That certainly did the trick. Dev Dawn broke, and broke hard. I couldn’t get do anything.

So I then uploaded the cache folder from the last backup .. bam .. wierd css, no pics, no format .. couldn’t get into admin.

Third try actually worked .. I kept the folder and just cleaned out the directories. It makes sense now, but then .. five minutes ago, I thought it was done.

Warning: fopen(/home/dg/public_html/wp-content/cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/dg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 79

In the footer ::

Warning: flock(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/dg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 88

Warning: flock(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /home/dg/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 97

Obviously something has happened that is affecting the caching plugin i’ve got installed. Might just have to disable that for a while.

Edit:After unplugging the plugin and refreshing any browsers open, it now isn’t appearing on the site, but still appears in the admin panel, which hopefully is just because the admin panel cache hasn’t been cleared ..

Actually, I have no idea what I’m talking about really .. just hoping that turning it off will fix this for the moment.

"The Children of Hurin" is going to be about, well, Hurin’s kids. (Edit :: stupid, I had something about dwarves in here .. dumbass that I am)

Now let’s not get too excited. I mean, it’s not like Tolkien is one of the greatest fantasy/prose writers of all time. Bzzzzzzt! I haven’t been alive when he’s written something new. So this is kind of cool. So .. get excited! It’s awesome!

I can remember spending long hours pouring over the appendices in The Return of the King, and the wonderful tales/notes in The Silmarillion, my mind sucking in those little details and facts that would help me reach some cool social status .. wait .. that’s not why. I just love reading the stuff .. he created worlds. Awesome places and characters and themes. Themes. Turin Turambar and his tragic life. His cousin Tuor and that big city (Gondolin) in the mountains. The love story of Beren and Luthien. Not to mention, actually .. just the whole book .. so many cool things. The creation. Morgoth, Ungoliant, the Silmarils. Oh baby, the memories are flooding back.

Oh man, the hours I spent curled up in a chair reading those books.

So yeah, I’m looking forward to this one. And I’d reckon a bunch of other people will be too. For most of us, we have grown this massive fan base on the back of books written before we were born. That’s an amazing feat.

Anyway, ’nuff said. I’m gonna go return to the land of wonder I haven’t been in for a few years.